The Real Life Consequences of Being a Dark Sider
by springtime22
Summary: 3 Months after Blair and Chuck's wedding in the final episode. Gossip Girl has returned. Dan learns what it is like to have his secrets posted online - without having the luxury of being the one posting it. All together, they are determined to put an end to this Gossip Girl before things get out of control, again.


A/N: This story is the result of rewatching Gossip Girl on Netflix. In all honesty, I have no idea where this is going but I thought Dan, in particular, had really interesting character development during the six seasons, so this story will be a lot about him with some about the all three main characters.

As the summary says, it's set three months after Chuck and Blair's wedding, in between that time and the five year jump to Dan and Serena's wedding.

Chapter One: Brooklyn

"It's positive," said Blair, her voice wavered somewhere between tears and laughter. She couldn't believe this happened so soon, but it felt so right. "I'm pregnant."

A baby. Her and Chuck were going to have a baby. Just like the happy endings of the sappy romantic comedies she sometimes caught Dorota watching during her chores, an occurrence happening much more frequently without Gossip Girl blasts entertaining them with the real-life drama of the Upper East Side.

"Blair," said Serena, abandoning her magazine and gliding across the room to stand with her in the entryway of the bathroom. "That's amazing."

She nodded, joyfully, blinking away a few tears. "I have to tell Chuck."

"Of course," said Serena. She grabbed her purse from the table. "I have to go anyway. Dan's coming home from LA today."

Even a magical moment such as this one, such as being so mysteriously happy about something she didn't know she wanted, could crash at the mention of Serena's unfortunate relationship with Dan Humphrey. Only for Serena could Blair even pretend such a union wouldn't turn out to be a complete disaster, and even then, her act was only second-rate at best.

"Wow, I don't think I've ever seen someone go from being over the moon happy to completely disgusted so quickly."

Distain sometimes worked its way into Blair's expressions whether she liked it or not. And so, to make up for the lack of obedience from her facial muscles, she gave Serena a smile that she was sure appeared sarcastic.

"Are you still upset over him being Gossip Girl?"

"Umm, yeah," said Blair. "And how can you not be? Serena, he wrote terrible things about all of us. Not just on Gossip Girl, anonymously, but also, on Vanity Fair, under his own name."

"So you would be okay with him being Gossip Girl as long as he remained anonymous?"

"No," said Blair, then sighed.

This was not a conversation she wanted to have, especially not at this moment, this extremely happy moment. Dan Humphrey was a mistake Serena would have to make on her own. Again. And although the thought of the unavoidable mess their relationship would make when it imploded had the ability to momentarily offset the bliss of learning she was pregnant, it couldn't take it away completely.

She smiled one more time, without any trace of sarcasm. "I'm going to be a mother."

"Congratulations, Blair," said Serena, not at all concerned about the change in subject. "We should celebrate. After you tell Chuck? How about dinner? I'll invite everyone."

"Sounds perfect," she said.

And with that, Serena nodded and was on her way.

Without Serena there to distract her, Blair let her mind run wild. Would it be a boy or a girl? Would he look like a Bass or a Waldorf, or maybe somewhere in between the both of them? Would she have Blair's fashion sense, her flair for scheming? Would he wear bow-ties?

Deciding she couldn't bear to harbor this secret to herself any longer, she grabbed her phone to call Chuck. However, as her thumb hovered over the name Chuck Bass, her phone vibrated with a Gossip Girl alert. Her eyes didn't want to believe what they were seeing. She blinked. It was still there. She blinked twice. But it wasn't going away.

 _Spotted: Dan Humphrey getting into a car outside of JFK. We hear Manhattan's newest dark prince has been in LA for the last month. I wonder if his girlfriend knows what he's been up to and speaking of Serena…_

 _Also Spotted: S and B leaving a Brooklyn convenience store, pregnancy tests in tow. Two question, who used them and what were the results?_

 _As for me, I'm just happy to be back. That's right, Upper-East-Siders. You might have been free of me for a short time, but as well as we all know, happiness is fleeting, especially on the Upper-East-Side. Better grab it while you can folks, the new gossip game is this: take no prisoners. This time, I'm out for blood._

 _XOXO – Gossip Girl_

Blair stared at her phone.

She _glared_ at her phone.

Her pregnancy was hers to tell. She pictured Chuck reading the blast and wondering if it were true, if it were her or Serena. It was too much to imagine. Out of all the blasts she has had to endure – well, this one wasn't close to being the worst – but it certainly dealt a particularly hard blow. Blair had been robbed of one of the only times she'd had happy news to deliver.

It took another couple of minutes for her to register Gossip Girl was the one robbing her of this moment. Blair couldn't decide how this was possible; she'd been involved in the smashing of Dan's laptop, the one that held all of Gossip Girl's secrets as well as the coding for the website, which Dan had disconnected from the internet before the smashing.

And it should have ended with that. With shards of broken computer left in a Brooklyn loft.

It _should_ have ended there, but sometimes – though not as often as Dorota's soap watching – things that should stay dead come back to life. And with this particular resurrection, Blair was determined, in that moment, to be the one to put it back into the grave.

She was going to murder Dan Humphrey.

* * *

Chuck was going to murder Dan Humphrey.

But first, more importantly, business.

Granted it remained difficult to stay clued in to a Bass Enterprise board meeting while his mind raced with the possibility of Blair being pregnant. Not that'd it'd be terrible. In fact, though it was very soon in their already rushed marriage, Chuck welcomed the idea of having a family Blair.

By the time his meeting finished, Chuck wasn't even sure what had been discussed, he only remembered the beginning. The part where him and the board members talked about their newest obstacle, a certain lowly New York senator, who was actively engaged in trying to shut down his business. None of the options explored would work.

The board members of Bass Enterprises weren't comfortable with Chuck's preferred method of dealing with people who unwisely pitted themselves against his interests. He'd have to think of his own way of making the problem disappear; fortunately, he was well versed in this sort of thing.

Eventually, he'd have to think up a way of dealing with his senator problem. But today – at this moment – he had to find out what the hell was going on with Gossip Girl's return and what was or what wasn't happening with his wife.

Better Blair than Serena, he thought. He couldn't bring himself to imagine the implications of a Humphrey/van der Woodsen hybrid running around Manhattan.

Chuck slipped his phone from the inside pocket of his suit jacket, checking the ID and seeing Blair's name before answering. He heard her voice on the other end as he stepped into the elevator.

"Meet me in Brooklyn, ASAP."

"Brooklyn?" Chuck crinkled his eyebrows. "Why Brooklyn?"

"Because," she said, sounding annoyed. "Humphrey just crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and I, for one, am not going to sit around and wait for him to post another blast about me or Serena."

The elevator doors opened to the lobby of his office building and he strode across the room towards the door. There were so many questions he could ask, like so is it true? You or Serena? How do you know Dan Humphrey crossed the Brooklyn Bridge? But instead, something else bubbled to the surface of his thoughts, almost without his thinking about it.

"Are you sure it's him?"

"Of course it is," said Blair, instantly. "Who else would it be?"

While Chuck's immediate response was to pin the blame on the original blogger, it didn't make much sense. There was no reason, or at least any Chuck could see, for Humphrey to restart his website.

"I'll see you there," said Chuck, hanging up after he heard a click on the other side. He got into the car waiting for him and told his driver to head to Brooklyn.

* * *

Chuck looked around the ransacked Humphrey loft. It seemed liked it had been a long time since Dan lived here – hell, he couldn't even remember the last time Dan had even visited Brooklyn since his move to the Upper East Side – but the time away didn't seem to matter. This is where Chuck found Humphrey now, at this time.

On the floor, leaned up against the sofa for support and in the middle of the wreckage, overturned furniture and boxes of loose papers, was Dan Humphrey. He looked just about as frustrated and annoyed as Blair had sounded over the phone.

"Daniel," said Chuck, drawing attention to himself as he stepped through the door, which had been left open. Dan's head snapped up from whatever paper he'd been staring at and met his eyes. "You told me you had this under control."

"I did – I _do_ ," he said, running a hand through ridiculous hair. He looked back down at his papers. "I do have _that_ under control. This… this is something different."

"And what exactly," Chuck started, walking further into the loft, taking in the ruined sight as he did. He noticed the robbers, whoever they were, must have been looking for something special. They had left everything of value, preferring to damage it instead of take it with them. He mentioned to the surrounding wreckage. "Do you suppose this is?"

"I don't know."

"Really, no clue?"

"Listen Chuck," said Dan, he moved to stand, abandoning the papers he'd recently been obsessed with. "I don't know what's going on. It's not me this time, if that's what you're asking."

Chuck looked at his watch, suddenly remembering his reason for showing up in Brooklyn. Seeing the loft in such disarray made it slip his mind, but now that he remembered, he wondered why and how he had beaten Blair to Brooklyn. He put his attention back on Dan, watching as he put one of the tossed bar stools back upright and sat down.

"So the movie is dead?"

"Yes, well – Vanessa's movie is dead. I sold it to someone else before I left. Someone with less of an… a bias."

Chuck nodded. When Dan had called him asking for help to kill his own movie, he'd been confused. When he learned the film rights he somehow gotten into Vanessa's hands, he immediately understood. Any movie about their lives turned over to her vision would be worse than serialized chapters in Vanity Fair.

"Good. The last thing this world needs is Inside Out as told by Vanessa Abrams," said Chuck. He straightened his suit jacket. "How did you manage it?"

"Like we talked about," he replied. He leaned against the counter, still seated in the stool, in a relaxed sort of way. An act. Easy to spot for someone like Chuck, who noticed Dan's eyes trained on his own fidgeting fingers. "How did you find me here, anyway?"

"That remains to be seen."

Dan narrowed his eyes, confused. And then, as if on cue, Blair glided into the room with her shoulders back and her head up, full of a confident and smug presence that suggested a full-blown Blair Waldorf scheme.

"I installed a tracking app on your phone," said Blair, smiling.

"Why?" Dan blinked, one hand raised. "Why would you do that?"

"To prove to Serena you're still the same lying backstabber that tricked her into falling in love to write terrible things about her in Vanity Fair."

"Oh, okay," said Dan. He rolled his eyes and sat up a little bit straighter. "That makes sense. Not crazy at all."

Blair opened her mouth to what Chuck was sure was going to be another witty response, but he never found out with it was. She closed her mouth into a disgusted frown. Her eyes darted around the loft.

"Are you so flushed with new money you forgot to hire a cleaning service?"

"I got robbed, actually."

"What? Who would rob you?"

"That's a good question," added Chuck, giving Dan a pointed look.

He offered a shrug as a response. Another question he either didn't know the answer to or one he simply pretended he didn't know. Every day, it was getting harder and harder to tell.

"I guess," said Dan, finally, realizing neither Chuck nor Blair would lift their glares from him without something verbal. "It is probably the same person who put the site back online."

"What and we're supposed to believe that wasn't you?"

"Yes, because it wasn't me," said Dan. "Blair, you can't honestly believe that I would do this? Restart Gossip Girl, for what? I already got what I wanted from it."

"It is strange," said Chuck, "That you ran home to Brooklyn after this posted. When is the last time you've even been here? Not to mention your loft –"

"-My dad's loft."

Chuck paused for a moment, glaring at him for the interruption. "Your dad's loft has been vandalized, at this exact moment."

He shrugged again, then exhaled deeply and rubbed his temple. Before any of the three could offer anything else to the conversation, their phones buzzed simultaneously. Exchanging serious looks, they checked the second Gossip Girl post of the day.

 _What's this? C and B getting out of cars in Brooklyn, separately. Could they be on the hunt for the not-so-lonely-boy-anymore?_

 _Dan Humphrey's reign as Gossip Girl may be over, but it'll be a long time before anyone forgets who spilled all their secrets. Don't worry, D, by the time I'm finished, everyone will be too busy feeling sorry for you to care._

 _Turns out, we do what he was doing in LA. Two words: Vanessa Abrams._

 _XOXO_

 _-Gossip Girl_

Several times, Chuck looked from his phone, to Blair, and then to Dan, who gave a look as if to say I told you so.

"It could have been time delayed," she said.

"Yeah," said Dan, dripping with sarcasm. "Because I'm psychic now."

"This is impossible," said Chuck, purposely breaking up the bickering. Mostly because it served to remind him there was a time, however brief, that they had a relationship, and he imagined it had been formed and based around that very same bickering. "We all helped you destroy the Gossip Girl laptop."

"Yeah," said Dan, slowly, as if taking caution. "But before we destroyed it, I backed up everything on a flash drive… subscription numbers, tips, the website formatting…"

Blair once again took notice of the wrecked loft. "Which, let me guess, you kept here, and it's now gone."

Dan nodded.

"You're an idiot, Humphrey."

He didn't have time to protest this remark. Serena was the next one of them to walk through the open door, the atmosphere turning stormy as she did. She didn't seem to notice Blair or Chuck were even in the room. Her full, angry attention was directed solely on Dan.

"We need to talk."

* * *

A/N: Thanks for reading!


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